For many years now, it’s been trendy to blame television for all our woes. It makes our kids stupid. It makes our kids unimaginative. It makes our kids violent. It makes our kids materialistic. It makes our kids fat. I’ve read some interesting articles on the subject, mostly written by people who do not allow their children to watch television. Some of them don’t even have a television in their home. That’s their prerogative. But I’m done feeling like a bad mom because I do let my kids watch TV. I’m done being consumed by guilt every minute that my children spend in front of the small screen. I’m going to make an argument for reasonable TV watching. It may not be a trendy argument, but I think it’s a good one.

First, I disagree with people who argue that TV makes kids stupid. I was just brushing my teeth in the bathroom, and I heard my 2 ½-year-old in the other room speaking Spanish as she was watching Dora the Explorer. I was impressed. My toddler knows several words in a language I don’t know. Chances are, if she had not gotten to watch television, she would not have learned any Spanish until high school when our school district starts foreign language classes.

I’ve noticed that both my children have developed vocabulary they may not have been exposed to without television. My six-year-old son uses words like “rendez-vous,” “pedagogue” and “earnest.” Ask him where he heard them, and he’ll tell you it was from watching Disney movies on TV. Although my husband and I might have occasionally used these words, we don’t have the need to very often. Television exposes children to unusual situations, out-of-the-ordinary events that call for vocabulary we just don’t use in everyday speech.

Television gives children the opportunity to exercise math skills as well as reading. Most evenings, we’re too busy to have the TV on; however, if it’s on, we’re usually watching sports. My son’s practiced his math on baseball and football scores. He’s read the stats of Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning. He’s learned logic and strategy that he’ll be able to use to problem-solve.

Does television make children unimaginative? If it does, then maybe I should make my son watch more. Every year at parent conferences, his teachers’ only concern is that he tends to live in his own little imaginary world, peopled by Star Wars and Harry Potter characters, pirates and monsters that he gleans from movies, television and books. I hear anti-TV folks say that letting kids watch TV stifles their imaginations by stuffing their heads full of other peoples’ ideas. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t we beware of books too? I’m reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to my son, and he’s running around the house battling giant squid and sharks, much the same way he battles Transformers and Spiderman villains. The difference between TV and books may be more clearly delineated for adults than for kids – children seem to absorb the creativity in the same way, no matter what the medium.

As for violence, sure, if you let your kids watch violent shows, I’m sure they would be affected. I would no sooner let my children watch The Sopranos than I would read The Godfather to them as a bedtime story. Television is no more violent than literature. And some literature is far worse than ANYTHING you’ll see on TV.

As for television turning kids into materialistic brats, I think we need to keep it in perspective. As an anti-materialist myself, all those commercials for toys and fast food and candy do worry me, but my children’s materialism has been shaped far more by their grandparents’ indulgence than by advertisements. I find it’s pretty easy to counteract the influences of TV commercials anyway; my kids are more interested in what I have to say than what the boob tube says. On those rare occasions that my children talk about something they saw on TV, I simply say, “Yes, dear, that’s nice” and keep on moving. Now that my son’s older, I’ve actually talked to him directly about the dangers of advertisements. “Don’t believe everything salespeople say,” I tell him. “Sometimes they don’t tell the whole truth.” He’s only six, but he’s got the concept already. The other day, we were at the store and he saw a toy that had been advertised on TV. He looked at it carefully, then turned to me and said, “That doesn’t look as cool in person.” Kids aren’t as gullible as we (and Madison Avenue) like to think they are.

Then there’s the new thing – television must be to blame for our kids being fat. The anti-TV folks are winning this battle. But here’s the thing – kids cannot be running around every minute of the day. They have to have downtime. And whether they’re reading a book or watching a TV show, they’re not burning 100 calories a minute. Sure, if you let your kid watch four hours of television a day, he’s probably going to be fatter than a kid who watches one hour or no TV at all. But the biggest kid in my school was also the biggest nerd. He was home-schooled to 7^th grade, read voraciously, and he was ranked second in our class because he couldn’t pass Gym. He told me once he wasn’t allowed to watch TV at home. Hmm…

As far as I’m concerned, television gives my kids some opportunities they can’t always get from books. My little girl can’t read yet, so Dora the Explorer and Blue’s Clues are wonderful tools for developing her vocabulary. Watching sports on television shows my son athletes in action in a way he could not get from reading about them or listening to a radio broadcast. Now when he plays baseball, he tries to imitate Derek Jeter’s movements. TV is just like anything else in a child’s life – parents have to exercise control and caution. You don’t want to let your kids eat 20 Twinkies a day or let them read the Marquis de Sade at age 10, but you have to feed them and you want them to read. You can let them watch TV in good conscience, as long as you’re monitoring what they watch and how much. Television can be, in the words of Dora, muy bueno!

1. Compared to before you had children, it will take you twice as long to get out the door to go somewhere. The time increases exponentially with additional children.

2. You will have one-tenth as many opportunities for sex, and you’ll be too tired or irritated to take advantage of most of them.

3. Your house will never be completely clean again because the minute you finish cleaning one room and move on to another, your children will go into the first room and spill juice or Cheerios, get out a game or puzzle with 1000 pieces, or, better yet, throw up.

4. The kitchen will become your prison; the moment you have all the dishes in the dishwasher, the floor swept and the counters wiped, your child will announce that he’s hungry.

5. You will no longer eat hot food because whenever you sit down to eat, your child will need a new diaper, a refill on juice, or help cutting their food. Very often, they will need all of the above at the same time. If you have more than one child, you may not eat at all.

6. Even if you do manage to lose all your baby weight, you will not look the same as you did before you had children. You will have no time to do your hair or put on makeup; your clothes will all have stains of various hues. Many days, you will not even have time to take a shower.

7. Forget sleep. One of your children will be sick or experiencing nightmares almost every night. And if they do manage to sleep through the night, you won’t sleep anyway because you’ll be waiting for them to wake up, and you’ll be worrying about all the things you didn’t get done for tomorrow.

8. You will no longer be able to just watch the news. Every violent crime or natural disaster that is reported will send you into an emotional tailspin as you start worrying about the safety and well-being of your own children.

9. However many children you have, multiply it by two. That is how many children will be in your home at any one time once they start school and start having friends over.

10. You know how you can’t wait for your kids to be in school full-time so that you’ll have more free time? Forget it. Having kids in school means doing homework (yes, you too), chaperoning field trips, packing lunches, dealing with fundraisers, attending open houses and parent-teacher conferences, going through backpacks every night, and managing mountains of papers that get sent home daily.

11. You will reach levels of frustration of which you did not even know were capable as your little one’s favorite word becomes “NO!”

12. You will receive loads of advice, especially from people who do not have children.

13. You will need to go back to school to get a degree in engineering so you can figure out how to extricate their toys from the “childproof” packaging, how to set up their stroller, and how to put their car seat in correctly.

14. Every “expert” will give you a different opinion on every aspect of your child’s life. No matter what you feed your kids, how you put them to sleep, what toys you give them, you’ll be doing it all wrong.

15. You will become an expert on poop.

16. You will know more about Blue’s Clues, Dora the Explorer and Buzz Lightyear than about fashion, sports or current events.

17. You will be able to recite “Green Eggs and Ham” (or some other Dr. Seuss masterpiece) by heart.

18. The old saying, “Father works ‘til set of sun, but Mother’s work is never done,” is pure, unadulterated truth.

19. Remember those grandparents who were so excited about having grandbabies?  They’ll have plans every Friday and Saturday night and will, therefore, be sadly unavailable to babysit.

20. You’ll adore your children, but you’ll constantly wonder, “What would life have been like if we hadn’t had any?!”

I’ve been awake for just over 1 hour, and already I’m sympathizing with Andrea Yates.

It’s a school day, so I had to get up and get my kids ready. No problem. I tossed on some workout pants, a t-shirt, a baseball cap, and my flip-flops, and I was the picture of fashion. I headed downstairs to put my son’s lunch into his lunchbox (he refuses to eat the school lunches) and found his homework, undone, sitting on the counter. Realizing I needed some extra time to help him finish that, I raced through the kitchen, making hot chocolate, grabbing Pop-Tarts, and pouring cereal into car-friendly containers. Then I ran upstairs, turned the corner, hooked my hip on the corner of the stairwell and knocked a bag off the shelf. I rubbed my hip and snatched the bag off the floor. Just looking at this particular bag made me mad: it contains cargo pants that I bought for my husband; they were too long, so I exchanged them. Then they were too tight. I told my husband he can take them back, and he was irritated and told me not to bother buying him clothes anymore. I won’t. At least until he starts complaining again about his pants having holes in them.

I went in to wake up my son. My son’s a very good kid but not in the morning. He’s just not a morning person; he gets that from me. This morning, however, he was particularly whiny, especially when I told him we needed to do his homework. He started kicking every unfortunate piece of furniture in his path until he stubbed his toe. Then he began to cry in earnest. I managed to get him dressed and brushed and installed him downstairs with his breakfast and homework.

My baby girl’s not all that fussed about mornings either. Plus, she’s been coughing all night the past few nights. So when I walked into her room to get her up, she immediately started crying, “no, no, no.” I wrestled her into her clothes, wetted down her unruly curls and took her downstairs.

At that point, our neighbor girl popped in to ride with us to school. I noticed she was wearing a jacket and asked her about the weather. She said it wasn’t cold, but I asked my son if he wanted his jacket. No, he said, he didn’t want it. I checked his homework and threw it into his bookbag, then started herding the three kids into the van. We’d taken four steps outside when my son started whining about being cold. Of course, my little girl had to chime in, “Jacket! Jacket!” I told them I’d get their jackets once they were all in the car and buckled up. My son also announced that he had a headache and needed some Tylenol. Fine.

I got them into the van, then ran in and grabbed jackets, a Tylenol and a cup of soda. The microwave clock said we were supposed to be leaving…NOW! I raced back outside, tossed the jackets to the kids, and handed the soda and Tylenol to my son. I shut the door and got into my seat just in time to hear my daughter start a coughing fit. She coughed so hard, she threw up all over herself. Cheerios and hot chocolate. It smelled great. My son and his friend started gagging.

I ran back into the garage and grabbed an old towel out of a box of rags. I cleaned her up as best I could, trying to calm the two older kids down so they wouldn’t throw up too. Then I jumped back into the driver’s seat and promptly backed up over the trash cans that the garbage men had so kindly put right behind the corner of my van. I got out for the third time, tossed the cans into the yard and proceeded to drive the kids to school. We were a couple minutes later than usual, but we were still in the middle of the drop-off line.

When we pulled around in front of the doors, I jumped out and let the kids out. Our neighbor girl hopped out and bopped away, but my son took his sweet time getting out, then announced that he wanted his jacket on. So I’m trying to get his jacket on him and hand him his backpack, which is rather heavy today since it’s full of library books because it’s library day. He’s whining about being cold and his heavy backpack, and we’re holding up the entire line of cars, and one of the teachers hurries over to help. I was mortified. The very sweet teacher hustled him off so I could get back in the car and pull forward. I’ve never been so happy to get rid of my son.

The instant we pulled away, my daughter started crying for her brother. I was so busy trying to calm her down that I nearly blew a stop sign and got flipped off by a lady driving one of those short buses for one of the daycare centers. Classy. I’m glad my kids don’t go to daycare.

My little girl’s going through this cute little phase where she asks for something, you give it to her, she screams, you take it away, she screams again. During our 8-minute trip back home, she pulled this stunt three times - with her sippy cup, a blinking ice cube toy, and a piece of gum. We got into the house and I gratefully abandoned her to Blue’s Clues. Thank God for Joe and Blue.

Did I mention I haven’t even had a cup of coffee yet?